I'm a Bisexual Guy and, No, It's Not Just a Phase

A few months ago, I came out as bisexual to my new gay friend. It took only a few minutes for him to ask when I'd last had sex with a woman. I was prepared for the question and gave him the answer without missing a beat. This was nothing new to me.

I'm well aware that people often view my openness about being bisexual as a tacit relinquishing of privacy about my sex life. For many people who aren't bisexual, I have to prove myself—and the fact that, no, I'm actually not gay—by openly having sex with people of multiple genders at any given time.

People have consistently asked me these sorts of questions since I was 14, the first time I publicly came out as bisexual. As I dated girls throughout my teenage years, my friends would ask me if I was still certain I was bisexual. When I began to date guys in college, my parents asked me if I had “picked a side” yet. When I told them I was still bisexual, they assumed I was still going through a phase and would eventually decide to be straight or gay.

Anyone who's waiting for me to pick a side will be waiting forever because it's never going to happen. I'm bisexual, and that's that.

I get it. Even I once thought that bisexual people decided to either be straight or gay.

When I was younger, bisexuality was foreign to me. It's not like I suddenly woke up one day with the eureka moment that I liked boys and girls. Instead, my attraction to girls came first. In the third grade, I was smitten with a girl who played in the band with me. It was in my pre-teen years that I began to find boys my age attractive. It started with a close friend and branched off to other guys I spent time with on various sports teams.

At first, I thought everyone was attracted to people of multiple genders too and that they’d decide to be either straight or gay (or get categorized à la Harry Potter’s sorting hat maybe). Then one day, I Googled “I like boys and girls.” When the word bisexual came up, I was finally able to verbalize my attractions.

As I grew older, I found more robust definitions of bisexuality, like that of bisexual activist Robyn Ochs, that deeply resonated with me as someone who is attracted to individuals all over the gender spectrum. "I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted—romantically and/or sexually—to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree," Ochs writes.

Although I fully embrace my bisexuality, coming out can still be an anxiety-inducing experience, like it is for many other queer people.

Despite my coming out as bisexual over a decade ago, it’s something I still do regularly with friends and strangers alike. For bisexual people, coming out happens every time we have a partner with a different gender than our previous ones or when we're hanging out with people in different contexts. I come out to gay people who meet me in gay spaces and to straight people who meet me in straight spaces. Depending on where I am, how I present, or who I’m with, my bisexuality may or may not be believed.

My bisexuality is especially complicated because I experience most of my life in gay spaces as an activist who writes, speaks, and organizes primarily about LGBTQ issues. I also engage in my femininity, an expression historically powerful and radical for queer people. I’ll wear makeup out, heels in nightclubs, and my mannerisms can label me as a femme guy. All these things can make people assume I’m gay instead of bisexual.

Rarely do people assume I’m straight. Besides my being more femme than some men, bisexual men are almost always stereotyped to be gay. On the other side, bisexual women are almost always stereotyped to be straight. This idea, rooted in patriarchal superiority, is that once you're attracted to a man with a supposedly almighty penis, that's it: You must be primarily attracted to people with penises for the rest of your days.

I've even gone through breakups because of the notion that I can't truly be bisexual.

My girlfriend in college subscribed to this idea, eventually breaking up with me after a few months of dating, because her friends teased for having a “gay boyfriend.” She knew shortly after I began seeking her out that I was bisexual, but she didn’t see it as real because she never saw me with a guy. Looking back, I know she didn’t ever really accept my bisexuality and tried to ignore it as much as possible.

When she broke up with me, I asked her if she doubted my romantic and physical attraction to her. She said she didn't, but she couldn’t handle what others thought of my sexuality.

When people like my ex and her friends assume my bisexuality is just a stepping stone to coming out as gay, they presuppose that bisexuality isn’t queer enough. Bisexuality, to them, is half gay and half straight. This remedial understanding of my sexuality fails to understand bisexuality's fluidity and complexity. Bisexuality is 100 percent bisexuality, and doesn’t need to be quantified by anything else.

It's not just a personal issue. This idea of bisexuality as a phase or nonexistent orientation has tangible, negative impacts on our community at large.

A 2015 report from the Equality Network in the United Kingdom surveyed 513 bisexual respondents, 48 percent of whom experienced biphobia in medical offices when trying to access services and 38 percent of whom received unwanted sexual comments about their orientations when trying to access these services. Sixty-six percent of respondents felt they needed to pass as straight when attempting to access medical care, and 42 percent felt that they needed to pass as gay or lesbian.

Overall, only 33 percent of respondents usually felt comfortable telling their doctors they were bisexual, and 28 percent of respondents never felt comfortable doing so. Without this knowledge, it's impossible for doctors to fully advise bisexual people on how to look after our sexual and reproductive health, leaving us vulnerable to illnesses and conditions that could otherwise be prevented.

There's also the fact that bisexual women are disproportionately more likely to experience sexual violence. Sixty-one percent of bisexual women report experiences of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, compared with 44 percent of lesbian women and 35 percent of straight women, according to the most recent data available from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey.

Bisexuals are the invisible near-majority, making up almost half of the LGBT community. But we're consistently erased from queer narratives and history. We bisexual people aren't affirmed for who we are but pushed aside into binary boxes that cannot contain us.

Some argue it would be easier for everyone involved if bisexuals identified as straight or gay, depending on our current relationships. That it’d be less confusing, and we’d face less biphobia, if we just stuck with a sexual identity that’s on the binary. Yet, for me, that’d be denying part of my identity. My bisexuality is an innate part of who I am, and to let others define me would be denying my whole self.

Regardless of the gender of my partner, I’m bisexual. I am not defined by my relationship or by people outside of it. I define my sexuality around my romantic and sexual attractions as well as my bisexual community. I was bisexual when I came out over a decade ago, I’m bisexual today, and I will be bisexual tomorrow.

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